Ken Gehrig of Temple City California has had a particularly morbid
career of playing cadavers and accident victims, murderers and even
body parts! He has been on the stage since age 8, played Ebenezer
Scrooge for ACT, a California Children's Theatre at age 10.
In the early
80's he returned to Dickens'famous ghost story, playing multiple roles in a San Jose production of "A Christmas Carol" starring John Carradine--among
those roles one of the tortured spectres introduced by Marley.
Mr. Gehrig's film debut was as a motorcycle accident victim (Injured
Man in E.R.) in That's Life! - So ist das Leben (1986)
directed by Blake Edwards!
Co-actor Jack Lemmon would look at Mr.
Gehrig's horrendous makeup and exclaim, "Jesus!" So, Mr. Gehrig has
chosen to think that Lemmon may have thought of him as the new Messiah!
For television, Ken spent a particular day feeling "buried alive" as he
was a hand and foot model for corpses for the wrap-arounds with the
Crypt Keeper in HBO's _Tales from the Crypt(1989)_!
Ken Gehrig is a charter member (actor, writer, director) of Murder 4
Hire, an improv audience-participation murder mystery group, playing
such venues as The Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach and the
now-demolished Old Spaghetti Factory in Hollywood.
For this company and other murder mystery troupes he has played such
villains and suspects as film director Steven Spiegelberger for "Murder
in La La Land", Tony Menace in "Text M For Murder" and Stogey
Carmichael in "Murder in Casablanca". Once he had to sit perfectly
still in an antique sauna as a murder victim, playing dead while
audiences drifted by, often wanting to peek under his bath towel.
One of his least morbid roles was as Lita Grey's chauffeur in the
Richard Attenborough film,
_Chaplin(1992)_ starring
Robert Downey Jr. However, formal garb
like that of a chauffeur has also been Mr. Gehrig's ticket to memorable
connections:
As a tuxedoed purveyor of singing telegrams in the
80's and 90's, Mr. Gehrig had the pleasure of performing for Barbra Streisand,
Steven Spielberg,
George Lucas,
Gene Wilder,
Gilda Radner and many others as they were
recipients and spectators of his classical telegrams.
